Member-only story
People Problems Are Sometimes Management Problems
An awkward workplace handover made me question what managers are actually responsible for.
There was a personnel reshuffle.
Two people moved from my team to another department. I had been helping with part of their work, so I was supposed to keep doing it until the handover was complete.
Except the handover took a while.
By the time about three months had passed, my own workload had picked up too. The task had always been something I handled when I had free time. And once the two of them moved to another department, it had become something closer to a goodwill gesture on my part. It wasn’t even part of what I was evaluated on.
So I lowered its priority.
I didn’t process things in real time. I dealt with them in batches whenever I had time. I hadn’t stopped doing the work altogether. There were records, too.
Then one day, my manager asked me:
“Hadn’t you stopped doing that lately?”
Apparently, the manager in the department they had moved to had said I no longer needed to do the work. It seems I had given the impression that I hadn’t been handling it for about two months.
